Use PPC Results to Fine-Tune Your SEO Strategy

Written by: Jason Bayless | June 25, 2013

It’s widely recognized that an effective SEO campaign can have a much higher ROI than many PPC campaigns. But it’s also a fact that you can’t reach all customers with one marketing technique, and diversification is a must.

So PPC is still an important strategy – and to make the very best use of your PPC campaign, mine its data for information you can also use to boost your SEO.

PPC and keyword strategy

When you’re setting up a PPC ad campaign, it can be very tempting to go for the broad, simple terms that tend to be extremely competitive – and therefore more expensive.

Meanwhile, you might find that you’re getting less traffic, but much more qualified traffic, from PPC ads with long-tail keywords. These terms are less competitive (and thus cheaper) than the broader terms, but they are more likely to be the keywords prospects are searching for when they are ready to make a purchase.

So how do you use this information to your SEO advantage? Look through your PPC ad data to discover:

Which keywords are working best for your PPC ad campaign

What the conversion rates are for your most popular terms (not just the number of visits)

Whether your popular keywords are more geared to making a sale or providing useful information. If you provide really useful content without making an obvious sales pitch, that increases customer trust in your brand as an industry leader – and makes a future sale more likely.

The information-providing approach works much better for organic search conversions than for PPC, but analyzing your most successful PPC keywords can help you turn sales content into effective informational content.

Provide better landing pages

Now that you know how your PPC keywords are performing and have an idea of how to use them to generate content for organic search, it’s time to double-check your landing pages. Do the landing pages for your PPC ads perfectly match the keywords that lead people there? If not, you could be frustrating prospective customers – and wasting valuable money on PPC campaigns that aren’t as effective as they should be.

Use PPC search query data for SEO

There might be some search terms that perform well for PPC ads but don’t generate many organic searches. However, it might be worth your while to create pages of content for these terms (perhaps in the form of blog entries) just to make sure you can keep up with your prospects’ ever-changing organic search habits.

Use SEO for PPC

While you’re taking a closer look at your PPC and SEO campaigns, why not review the pages you created for organic search that are your top performers in terms of conversions? You might find fodder for new PPC ads there. Or you could repurpose and retool that popular content as landing pages for your PPC campaigns.

Consider adding new calls to action or special offers based on what you learn from this PPC/SEO exercise – because these tactics are great marketing tools on their own, but even better when they work together.